The recent ad campaign launched by Lays all over the world was quite interesting. While earlier, Lays focused on taste via its slogan “No one can eat just one”, recently they have switched to selling an experience similar to Coca Cola with its “Smile With Lays” slogan. In India, it has been launched as “Smile Deke Dekho” with current Bollywood sweetheart couple Ranveer Kappor and Aliya Bhatt as the celebs sharing a smile and a bag of chips in their advertisement.
When I saw the end of the ad though, I noticed something very odd. The company redesigned all six lays chips flavour packs. They now have a smiling man or woman’s bottom half of their face on the pack. Each of the flavours has unique unknown persons face on the bag. Three bags had women and three bags had men. The odd part was, they were all white. In other words, Lays had whitewashed their campaign.
I was curious to know whether this whitewashing was done internationally or just in India. When I searched on the web, I found another similar picture with many different faces of different skin color and ethnicity on the Lays packs. This means that the whitewashing happened only in India.
I think the company has deliberately shied away from choosing a dark-skinned face even for one of their six designs. The question is why? Do they believe having a brown-skinned or black-skinned Indian on their packs will turn off customers? Of course, they do.
And if you have any doubt, look at the international Lays chips lineup. Do you see any fat people or old people? Nope, because who would buy a bag of chips with a fat persons face on it or an old person’s face on it, or a fat old person. Given that Lays is one of the most unhealthy foods for brand loyalists, it can be argued that “Many fat people may not eat lays but most regular lays eaters are most likely obese”.I have doubt that those healthy faces on their packaging do not eat Lays or any other unhealthy snacks. Thus one would expect Lays to honour those loyal to their brand by putting up their picture on their product packaging. But Lays wouldn’t want to show the world what happens to individuals who eat Lays chips regularly. They wouldn’t do anything which they think would hurt their bottom line, and that includes showing dark-skinned faces on their packaging.
I do wonder though, did their market research concluded that dark-skinned people are more tolerant towards fair-skinned faces being used for product promotions and fair-skinned people responded less favourably towards dark-skinned faces on their products, Or, was it just that the marketing team were mostly or all fair-skinned people who didn’t think of diversity during their brainstorming sessions?
Anyways, the next time you pick a bag of Lays, know that in addition to depriving your body of healthy nutrition, this product also perpetuates the “fair skin is beautiful and dark skin is not” mentality. I hope Lays India changes its packaging to reflect the diversity in Indian society.
If they decide to continue with this racist campaign, then they should give a small tube of fair and lovely or another fairness cream so that my face can get the skin tone worthy of eating those Lays chips